If the
unprecedented global protests over insulting depictions of the Prophet Mohammed
in a book, newspaper or a papal
speech tell us anything, it is that Muslims around the world can act in concert
without following a leader or sharing an ideology. While such demonstrations
might possess a local politics, in other words, they are shaped by global
movements that lack traditional political meaning, not least by sidelining
leaders and institutions for popular action in the name of a worldwide Muslim
community as seen on television. The same holds true for Muslim support of
global militancy, whose televised icons are capable of attracting a following
without the help of local institutions or leaders.

The new global
arena that such movements bring to light, then, presents a threat to politics
conventionally conceived. This is a threat that Muslim liberals are trying to
address by promoting the cause of dialogue and debate on a global scale; the
most recent manifestation of this trend was the letter sent on 13 October 2007 in the name of
138 Muslim "scholars, clerics and intellectuals" to "the leaders of all the
world's churches, and indeed to all Christians everywhere."

In engaging in
this effort, though, Muslim liberals also risk moving beyond the political
structures of liberalism: chief among them the nation-state and its
representative institutions. There is nevertheless a great deal of funding
available for such efforts today, mostly from western governments interested in
promoting "moderate" Islam internationally; and it is not difficult to mount a
critique of the way in which Muslim liberals are enticed into supporting the
particular projects of such states by accepting this funding.

But even at their
most genuine, such projects to support liberals tend to be counterproductive in
the long run, having in the past done little more than create dependent and
thoroughly compromised Muslim elites in Asia and Africa
whose liberalism never became a living factor in their societies. I do not
however intend to pursue this easy line of criticism here; instead I focus on
the more general difficulties of dialogue and so of the limits of
liberalism itself in a global arena lacking political institutions of
its own.

A disingenuous discourse

In the first few
years after 9/11, Muslim liberals were able to mount only defensive manoeuvres,
presenting themselves as voices of moderation in the media while at the same
time protesting the anti-Muslim tone that had come to mark so much public
debate and government action in the west. But while the organisations they
founded have had an undeniable importance in protecting the rights of Muslims
living in Europe and America,
the efforts of these liberals to advocate religious moderation appear to have
had little effect on those who were not already "moderate" to begin with.

"Dubai
cosmopolis" (19 April 2007)In any case,
despite their prodigious output of apologetic writings, Muslim liberals and
their supporters possessed no global presence equivalent even to the most
mediocre of militants. Naturally their lack of influence does not mean that
most of the world's Muslims are opposed to the liberals among them, only that
these moderates have been unable to assume any effective leadership globally.
Recently some among the moderates have begun to conduct a more proactive media
campaign that brings together the scattered energies of Muslim liberals in a
collective enterprise.

Such for example
was the open letter that an array of thirty-eight Muslim politicians, clerics
and intellectuals from around the world wrote the pope while global protests
were occurring in response to his slighting reference to Mohammed in his Regensburg
address of 12 September 2006. Interesting about this letter was the fact that
it moved beyond a standard and reactive defence of Islam to instruct Benedict
XVI about the necessity of tolerance and understanding for the common good.
More important, however, was its attempt to achieve a global presence by
neglecting the nation-state and its representative institutions (in which I
also include international organisations) to address the head of a church that
both is and is not part of a liberal order. The Muslim letter of 2006, in
other words, sought to make a global intervention by addressing itself to
Christendom as a whole.

A year later more
Muslim notables, including many among the letter's signatories, issued another
epistle, now addressed not only to the pope but the heads of all the major
churches (indeed, it appears, to every Christian leader its Muslim authors
could find). This was a letter of invitation, asking Christians and Muslims to
come together by recognising that both their scriptures preached the love of
God and of the neighbour.

As open letters
released to the media, of course, these communications were aimed at public
opinion around the world as much as they were directed to the eminences addressed.
Indeed the pope and other churchmen to whom these letters were sent served as
their media of dissemination to a global audience. Such epistles of moderation
therefore play the same role as Osama bin Laden's letters and proclamations to
the west, which are sometimes also signed by a variety of militant Muslim
leaders. Unlike these latter, however, the epistles of moderation eschew all
political debate by disingenuously casting the difficulties of Christian-Muslim
relations in a purely religious light.

Consider, for
example, the following passage from the 2007 letter:

"Finding common
ground between Muslims and Christians is not simply a matter for polite
ecumenical dialogue between selected religious leaders. Christianity and Islam
are the largest and second largest religions in the world and in history.
Christians and Muslims reportedly make up over a third and over a fifth of
humanity respectively. Together they
make up more than 55% of the world's population, making the relationship
between these two religious communities the most important factor in
contributing to meaningful peace around the world. If Muslims and Christians
are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace. With the terrible weaponry of
the modern world; with Muslims and Christians intertwined everywhere as never
before, no side can unilaterally win a conflict between more than half of the
world's inhabitants. Thus our common future is at stake. The very survival of the world itself is
perhaps at stake."

What is striking
is that the authors here envisage a religious confrontation between
Christianity and Islam that is far more extensive than anything Bin Laden would
countenance - since it makes Christians all over the world (and not simply
those from certain western countries) into the potential enemies of Islam,
ignoring the fact that the majority of the world's Christians do not live in
the west and are not therefore party to some epic confrontation with Muslims.
But I suspect this expansiveness of address was meant only to disguise the
letter's small significance by mounting the parody of a global event.

A simulacrum of dialogue

Unlike the first
epistle its second incarnation did not arrive as a reaction to some violent demonstration of Muslim
offence, though it certainly staked its claims upon the possibility of such
violence in the future. In this sense both letters represented a kind of
negative force, depending as they did on militant Islam for the strength of
their arguments.

True, liberalism
everywhere gestures towards the supposed horrors of an alternative political
order in order to justify itself, but in the west these days it usually does so
with power on its
side. Muslim liberals, on the other hand, not only possess little power in
their own right, they have also been unable thus far to stage the spectacular
acts of sacrifice that mobilise people for a cause - acts of the kind that
militants are so adept at performing. These sacrificial acts need not even be
violent to be effective, as Gandhi and after him Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela demonstrated so
well through the entire course of the 20th century. Perhaps liberals are
incapable of staging such spectacles, given their devotion to protecting interests
rather than sacrificing them, which is why liberalism has always come to power
on the back of far more radical movements dedicated to religion, revolution or
revenge.

Muslim liberals,
too, would like to come to power on the back of radical Islam, but they have
never managed to ride the tiger of jihad and so must reach out to
the west for a helping hand. But this immediately puts them in the position of
their colonial ancestors, consummate middlemen who occupied a kind of
no-man's-land between the Christian masters and Muslim subjects of European
empires by claiming to represent each to the other.

Indeed, the
arguments of these Muslim liberals are drawn without exception from the lexicon
of their 19th-century predecessors, down to every single scriptural citation
they deploy. Such arguments do not therefore constitute any part of a dialogue
but are rather the ghostly reiterations of a conversation between men long
dead. Like the spectres they imitate, the signatories of these letters -
themselves a random assortment of government-appointed clerics, out-of-favour
politicians, exiled intellectuals, university professors, aspiring spokesmen
for Islam, converts and immigrants in the west - appear like nothing so much as
entrepreneurs trying to squeeze out a share of influence for themselves by
representing Muslims and Christians to one another.

With a few
exceptions, including the secretaries-general of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind and the Al-Khoei
International Foundation, these men (and a few women) do not in fact
represent any significant Muslim population; despite their sectarian,
territorial and professional diversity, they include neither a single religious
leader of any stature nor a single political one. Their representative
character, in other words, is constituted by the sheer diversity of these
individuals, who are therefore "representative men" in the colonial sense of
this term. All of which means that a response from the pope is the only way of
legitimising this ragtag group by lending it some kind of representative
character as an interlocutor of the Holy See.

Yet it is not at
all clear what kind of dialogue is possible between these Christian leaders and
their self-proclaimed Muslim counterparts, assuming for the moment the latter's
legitimacy. For one thing, Islam's lack of a church and therefore of dogma
strictly speaking means that there can be no equivalence even between Christian
and Muslim divines, let alone between the pope and a group of "representative
Muslims" who are likely disagree with each other on more subjects concerning
Islam than they disagree with Benedict XVI. In any case,
the absence of an institutional structure and so of dogmatic authority among
them means that these men and women cannot in fact talk about the same subjects
in the same way as the churchmen they address.

Moreover, these
Christian leaders can be addressed at all only because they happen to be
churchmen. For could our group of Muslims address Buddhists, Hindus or even
Jews in the same manner? Who would they address apart from some group of
religious entrepreneurs like themselves? Indeed different Muslim sects cannot
even address each other in the way their representatives do the pope, whose dogmatic
authority as the head of the Roman church is what finally lends his
interlocutors their coherence. Lacking such a structure of authority, Islam is
much closer to the world's other religions than it is to Christianity, which is
in fact the great exception among these faiths. But this makes the similarities
that the letters so frequently invoke between the two largest monotheisms both
true and false, since in some fundamental ways Islam is closer to Hinduism (in
its lack of a church organisation and hierarchy, say) than it is to
Christianity.

The vanishing neighbour

Like so many
things about them, the desire of Muslim liberals to make common cause with
Christians has a colonial history, one in which the moderates of the 19th
century sought to form a partnership with their European masters, generally
against some other group of fellow subjects. Whether it was greed for power or
the fear of rivals that motivated them, these men stressed their religious
kinship with colonial rulers to connive with them in the suppression of
opposing religious, sectarian, ethnic and other parties.

The words of the
2006 and 2007 letters - even though the signatories are not so crude as to
voice their dislike of any particular community, not even that of the militants
- breathe the same spirit of exclusivity as any edict of ostracism. For these
epistles would construct an exclusive relationship between Christians and
Muslims in particular, and between Christians, Muslims and Jews in general, by
displacing the possibility of a violence that marked them in the past to some
other body. The only problem with this quest for a monotheists' alliance is
that it goes against the geographical and demographic reality of the world's
religions, with Hindus and Buddhists being much more likely neighbours for
Muslims than Christians and Jews. In other words the quest for a special
relationship with Christianity or Judaism is an explicitly occidental one, in
which attention is shifted from the geographical and demographic realities of
Islam to focus on its adherents only insofar as they come into contact with
Christians and Jews in western Europe, north America
and the Levant.

The fact that the
second epistle of moderation speaks so glowingly about loving one's neighbour
makes it seem strange that the Muslims' actual neighbours are forgotten for the
only ones who count: Christians for the most part, and Jews out of courtesy,
but only because both are meant to share the injunction of loving their
neighbours. Yet surely loving one's neighbour has nothing to do with whether or
not this neighbour shares such an injunction, indeed rather the contrary if we
take the Gospels for our guide.

Birgitta Steene, "The Swedish cartoon: art as provocation" (10 September
2007)In the haste to
create an exclusive relationship with Christians in particular, their would-be
Muslim interlocutors have even forgotten that among the verses of peace and
amity they quote so liberally from the Qur'an are many that refer to pagans and
polytheists as much as they do to any monotheistic faith. But pagans and
polytheists are of course consigned to the flames by our moderates while Islam
is lifted out of its own much more pluralistic past to enter into the paradise
of monotheist uniformity. By ignoring the rich and contentious history of
Muslim relations with Zoroastrians, Buddhists or Hindus, these letters also
reduce the forms and varieties of religious interaction in the Islamic world to
a monotheistic point, in fact narrowing it simply to the similarities between
Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

All of this,
moreover, is based on the presumption that the recognition of similarity
necessarily leads to friendship and respect, whereas the opposite might well be
true - as it certainly is in the histories of violent conflict between Muslims,
Christians and Jews, to say nothing of Catholics and Protestants or Shi'a and Sunni. This exclusive focus on
monotheistic similarities leads to one conclusion: the rejection of religious
diversity and the consequent adoption of a Christian model for faith in
general. Perhaps this is why the second epistle attributes a completely
Christian locution to Islam: the love of God and of the neighbour.

A question of sovereignty

The
Christianisation of the world's religions proceeds apace, precluding the mutual
respect among them that is due only to the recognition of fundamental
difference and disagreement. For with similarity there comes disputation and
the narcissism of minor differences. So the letter to Benedict XVI in 2006 rejects
the claim that Islam was spread by the sword and attributes the greater part of
its conversions to missionary activity. But before their encounter with Christian
missionaries in the 19th century, Muslims had little notion of organised
proselytism, as indeed they would not without the institution of a church,
which means that conversions to Islam occurred in the absence of a mission as
much as of a sword.

Both epistles of
moderation are narcissistic in this way, for instance by pointing to minor differences between
Christianity and Islam while at the same time adopting the most Protestant
views of scripture. So the Qur'an is approached directly and without mediation
as if it were a transparent and self-evident text accessible to all, which goes
completely against its traditional reading in the Muslim world. This holy book
is moreover interpreted as literally as any American evangelist might interpret
his Bible, to the extent that the Christians and Jews it mentions are described
in the letters as if they were merely the ancestors of today's religious
communities, which is to say historical and sociological groups rather than the
exemplary figures and juridical categories of traditional thought.

In the 1920s, for
example, Muslim divines in India
saw nothing odd in forming an alliance of Hindus and Muslims under Gandhi's
leadership by invoking the Qur'an's description of a pact between Jews and
Muslims under the prophet's leadership.
These clerics, in other words, did not see the Jews mentioned in the Qur'an as
an historical or sociological community with contemporary descendants, but
instead as nothing more than exemplary figures who could stand in for Hindus
and provide the juridical precedent for a pact between Muslims and polytheists.
It is this kind of thinking that the monotheistic intimacies longed for by
Muslim liberals puts an end to.

Islam is not what
Muslim liberals, in their intellectual vapidity, would have it be. Militants,
on the other hand, are far more creative in their religious thinking and much
more imaginative about their means of propagating it. Insofar as violence
(however transient it might be) represents one of these means, the intellectual
adventurousness of militant Muslims poses a serious problem for
their liberal counterparts. Yet I am convinced that these militants will have
done more to revolutionise Islam in the long run than any collection of Muslim
liberals, no matter how diverse and representative the latter happens to be in
character. For by operating in a global arena without political leaders or institutions
of its own, these men reveal to us a vision of the future. All the moderates
have to offer, by contrast, is a past endlessly recycled - but the past not of
7th-century Arabia so much as of
19th-century Europe.

The Islam of
militancy and offence occupies a global arena in which it acts
without being an actor. That is to say militancy exists as a global agent by virtue
of sacrifices that are amplified in the media and mirrored around the world
without the benefit of political leadership and institutions, since even Osama
bin Laden exists for his Muslim admirers as nothing more than a media icon.
Whatever their local causes or consequences, therefore, such acts represent the
democratisation
of sovereignty in a global arena lacking sovereign power of its
own. This sovereignty is exercised by individuals of all descriptions through
the ostentatious sacrifice of their own lives as well as the lives of others in
the name of a community and a cause that remain invisible everywhere but on
television.

What is the
future of sovereignty in the global arena? How might it be attached to a set of
institutions and a form of politics that does not as yet exist there? Why has
religion come to provide the only vocabulary we have to describe this new
world? Such are the questions that
militancy poses and will in all likelihood proceed to answer. About these
questions the moderates have nothing to say.

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